SEYMOUR SIMON’S BOOK OF TRAINS

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Young trainiacs rejoice! The inimitable author of Seymour Simon’s Book of Trucks (2000) offers a companion volume featuring the same sort of huge, bright, sharply focused color photos paired to succinct descriptive and historical commentary. Sandwiched between an attention-grabbing gallery…

Young trainiacs rejoice! The inimitable author of Seymour Simon's Book of Trucks (2000) offers a companion volume featuring the same sort of huge, bright, sharply focused color photos paired to succinct descriptive and historical commentary. Sandwiched between an attention-grabbing gallery of locomotive headshots and elevated closing views of a pair of crowded rail yards lit by a low sun, the author introduces rolling stock, past and present-from quaint cog railways to state-of-the-art bullet trains, plus an array of freight and tank cars. Simon continues to irritate lazy readers by refusing to caption his pictures; instead, he alludes to them in the accompanying text, adding anecdotes, detail, and background information in typically calm, orderly prose. Detail-lovers might wish to know just which trains they are seeing, and a bibliography or list of Web sites at the end would not have been amiss-but big machinery has never looked better. (Nonfiction. 7-9)

PreS-Gr 4. Trains and individual freight cars are displayed in glorious full color in this oversized book. Simon offers information on different types of these machines from the earliest steam locomotives to France’s TGV, which can reach speeds of 300…

PreS-Gr 4. Trains and individual freight cars are displayed in glorious full color in this oversized book. Simon offers information on different types of these machines from the earliest steam locomotives to France's TGV, which can reach speeds of 300 miles per hour. The section on freight trains delves into each car from boxcars to the now-obsolete caboose. The sharp pictures cover half of each spread. One small complaint is that while the TGV and Japan's bullet trains are mentioned, they are not pictured. But never mind. Even preschoolers will be drawn in by the large, abundant photographs. Another winner from a popular author.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Steam locomotives, diesel locomotives, electric trains, passenger trains, high-speed trains, mountain trains, freight trains, boxcars, gondolas, flatcars, hopper cars, tank cars, auto-rack cars and cabooses - the prolific Seymour Simon (author now of over 200 nonfiction books for young readers) explains them all in lucid, engaging prose, accompanied by large, clear, colorful photographs. The text gives a brief overview of the history of trains, explains how the different kinds of locomotives work, and covers, briefly and succinctly, just about anything the reader would want to know about the different features of every kind of train car. The photographs accompanying each page of text, credited to many different photographers, are extremely bright and eye-catching. Do we really need yet another book on trains for the picture-book audience? Why not, when it's as attractively produced and sure to please as this one?